Friday, September 23, 2011

Fighting game tournaments are not like real life tournaments. Whereas in real life most of the people who compete do so for sport and train for it yearly, character stories in videogames need to be outlandish things full of good vs evil, revenge, and sometimes runaway brides. Those who say that fighting games have no stories really do a disservice to how committed the makers are for giving Mark Joe a reason to be in Mark of Punches 5.

But in giving characters a motivation, sometimes it clashes with the fact that regardless of the ending, the character will probably come back at some point. If you stick with a fighting game franchise long enough, you will see every character come back at least once, regardless of how resolved their plot arcs are or how dead they where last time. But some of these characters fullfilled their reason to join the tournament years ago. And yet, here they are, still trading blows. Who are this guys?

Tina Armstrong(Dead or Alive)

Tina is one of my favorite characters from this franchise, with her lighthearted personality and enormous breasts. However, her motivation has been weird from the start. And this is from a series that has a character that is trying to defeat a guy who saved her once.

See, Tina is a wrestler, but she doesn't want to be a wrestler. She wants to be in show business. So she gets into the tournament to get enough money to do so.

Can you two let me talk?

Now, let's pretend in this world wrestling isn't staged. But the tricky thing is, at the end of each game, Tina succeeds into getting into different aspects of show business, while not winning the tournament at all. Which makes no sense. If she breaks into modeling in game 1, why would she need to fight in another tournament to break into acting? If Dwayne"The Rock" Johnson wanted to become a singer, would he have to participate in a tournament, too? No, silly, he's already in!

And if winning was key to her goal, why can she still achieve it even though canonically, she lost?

This is why the movie changed her motivation to the less stupid "I want out of fake wrestling." And it's always sad when fighting game movies actually make sense of the games.

Sentinel(MVC3)

Sentinel, buddy: come here a minute. I know you started in a game that was mostly mutants. You hunt those. It's your job. And then you came back in Marvel vs Capcom 2. You where a little broken, but I guess all the mutants where there, so it made sense. If you had to fight Strider and Megaman, well, that's just fine.

If he wasn't a mutant, he probably heard about them.

But why are you in Marvel vs Capcom 3? No, DON'T tell me about your fruit palette shenanigans. In this game there's like 3 X-Gene mutants and arguably two more technical mutants.

And no wonder, man! Last I heard, Mutants without ongoing comic appearances where extinct. Even Jubilee's a vampire now. Maybe you should hunt vampires and quit this "fighitng game" business. You're not good at it anyway.

Balrog(Street Fighter)

Unlike everyone else in the Street Fighter universe, Balrog is in it for the money. He works for a terrorist in a military uniform and punches people to death. For the money. But is this paying off?

See, everytime a Street Fighter game ends, Bison is defeated. Well, except if he wins I guess.

I would also guess that Balrog probably goes to jail, or escapes somehow. But why? Does Bison pay ahead, and is the money that good? And how much money does one really need that going back to fight Foodtown Bruce Lee and Pink Ryu is worth it?

It's time to retire, Balrog. If you must fight, then fight. You don't need Shadaloo. And Shadaloo sure as hell doen't need you.

Seung Mina(Soul Calibur)

Seung Mina is a young Korean woman who wants Soul Edge because she doesn't want to get married off by her family and also to defend her country. So she runs away to search for the sword.

Am I missing something, here, lady? YOU RAN AWAY FROM HOME! You don't need to depend on your parents anymore. Sure, you can't join the Korean Army because you're a gurl, but you could always just join the battle or pull a Mulan.

As for the marriage...well, problem solved. You ran away from home! Just stay away from home and that's it.You don't need a magic sword, you just need some follow through. It's obvious you're self sufficient if you're traveling to some other country and fighting Ivy.

I think she'll do just fine.

The thing about Mina is, we don't know if she's back in the series newest, decades after the fact timejump. But I'm guessing she'll be back.

Scorpion(Mortal Kombat)

You could argue that Scorpion is probably Mortal Kombat's most known character. Yet the demonic undead Ninja hasn't had a real reason to fight in years.

See, at first it was revenge for the death of his family as well as himself. And he got it. He killed the guy. Then the guy's brother showed up, dressed the same. This lead to a hilarious misunderstanding that lasted several games and a spinoff. Finally, in Mortal Kombat 4, he finally caught up with the guy, but He wasn't the killer, this other magic motherfucker was to blame. So he dragged that guy to Hell.

GET OVER IIIIIIIIT!

After that, Scorpion's motivation started to get muddy. He chased the guy out of hell, became a conduit for the Elder Gods, then decided to get revenge against the Gods. Come on, Scorpion, kill the guy and rest in fucking peace already!

Oh, wait, time got reversed? Well, back to hunting the brother of the guy who killed you then, I guess?

One of this guys is asking you to be prepared for a coup . The other is asking you to be prepared to put hair on your horns . Names are fun....

What is this?

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